I wasn’t without resources. I made a pretend call to the police, shouting into the phone that there were these three punks menacing me. Wherever they were hiding — I couldn’t see any of them from the phone box — they were probably too far away to hear my bluff. I was ranting into the phone like some kind of madman, saying whatever came into my head. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t come at me in the booth. One of them could pull the door open while the other two rushed in and grabbed me. If they charged me, I would have to use the gun to protect myself and I was considering whether it would be enough to show it to them. The idea of teaching them a lesson attracted me, of letting them know they had fucked with the wrong person. I felt a surge of outrage (I was a guest in their country, wasn’t I?) and imagined their astonishment when I pointed the gun at them and opened fire. The rat-faced one with the purple hair, the most unpleasant of the three, would fall first, a look of total disbelief on his face, then the tall loose-limbed one with the pocked faced. The fat one, who couldn’t keep up with the others, who seemed content merely to hang around with them, would run for his life. And maybe then, I would understand what they were about, would feel their loss like the death of someone close I had wanted to love but hadn’t been able to until it no longer mattered. It gave me a lift for the moment, a fast-fading high, to imagine the danger I represented to them.
“I have my motor parked just around the corner,” Max was saying. “Why don’t we go over to my office, old son, discuss the future of our longstanding collaboration.” He dropped the rock he was holding, put an arm around Terman’s shoulder and led him to a red Corniche parked illegally just where the street turned on itself.
Although distrustful, Terman offered no resistance, let himself be taken in tow to Max’s car. He had no doubt that Max would find some way to exact vengeance when the time was right. The director would not forgive being knocked down, particularly in front of a woman he wanted to impress.
The red Corniche pulled up in front of the Holland Park house.
“This isn’t your office, Max,” he said.
“It isn’t, is it?” said the director who seemed surprised that it wasn’t. “I just remembered there’s someone hanging out at my office I’m trying to avoid. You don’t mind, do you? We’ll conspire in one of the unused rooms.”
Terman pretended he had lost his key or left it behind, went through each of his pockets for Max’s witness, feigning distress.
“That was stupid of you,” Max said.
“A human error,” he said, forgiving Max his crude remark.
“I seem to remember a kitchen window that has a broken lock. Do you know the one I mean?”
“The lock’s been repaired,” Terman said.
Max studied the situation, removed a key from his wallet. “This just might do the trick,” he said.
“A skeleton key?” Terman asked.
Max opened the door. “I have learned, my friend, to be prepared for any emergency that might arise.”
In a moment they were inside, shoulders bumping as Max pressed on ahead, moving Terman out of his way. Stationing himself at the kitchen table, Max made seven phone calls to let those who might want to be in touch know where he was staying. After that, they settled in the study, Max behind the desk, Terman on the couch, their habitual configuration.
Max took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves. “To work,” he said, withdrawing a script from his briefcase.
“How many nephews does the producer have?” asked Terman, a remark he remembered having made at least once before, and which he promised himself he would never make again.
“Regard,” said Max.
It was not, as he expected, another version of The Folkestone Conspiracies (AKA “The Last Days of Civilisation”), but something else altogether, an unsigned screen treatment of a moderately popular English novel of two years back. “What am I supposed to do with this?” Terman said. The phone interrupted them, as it would, at approximately eight minute intervals for the next hour. “I want the benefit of a lucid intelligence,” Max said.
“Wherever you go,” Terman said when Max was free momentarily, “you carry with you the seeds of distraction.”
“That doesn’t sound quite right,” said Max who seemed to be waiting for the next phone call to deliver him from a conversation he had no inclination to continue.
I continued moving south, avoiding the mob scenes whenever I could, though also careful not to be caught alone on a side street. I no longer made any effort to get away from them, pretended indifference to their pursuit. They kept out of sight much of the time so when one or another appeared, popping out of some storefront as I passed, it was always a shock.
Max was lordly on the phone, threatened, cajoled, dispensed rewards, talked in voices Terman had never heard him use before. On one occasion he seemed to be offering the Holland Park house for someone else’s use. “What’s going on?” Terman asked.
“This doesn’t concern you, cowboy,” said Max. “Not to worry. I’m going to take a bath and change my shirt if it’s all the same to you. You might use the time to review the script I showed you.” He sailed the thick envelope at the couch, Terman ducking under it as it approached his head. “If anyone rings up while I’m in the bath, would you take the number down and say Mr. Kirstner will ring back in a bit. I’d appreciate it if you could do that.”
“Is the Henry Berger project dead?” he asked.
“Chancy,” Max said. “Hanging on.”
“Are we going into production?”
“Max made a gesture with his hand that indicated the remotest of possibilities. “Some of the money we expected has dried up. The script has got too many private jokes that only you and I understand. Do you get what I’m saying?”
When the phone rang Max asked Terman if he would answer it and take the caller’s number.
If that was all that Max wanted, it was easily enough done, yet he held back, letting the contemplation of a response suffice for the response itself.
“What are you waiting for?” Max asked.
“I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop,” said Terman. “I’m waiting for all the money to be in place.”
Max yawned, turned his back to him. “If you don’t want to work with me on this project,” he said, “you’re perfectly free to go your own way.”
The moment Terman lifted the phone to say hello, it had silenced.
“It doesn’t matter,” Max said, his abruptness belying the remark. He left to take a bath like a man leaving on a flight into space.
Terman stepped out into the hall and listened to the sounds of Max wallowing in his bath. When it was quiet he imagined that Max had fallen asleep in the tub, that leonine head slipping by degrees into the steamy water. The melodrama of Max drowning in his own bath gave him a certain satisfaction like a bad film that fulfills the crude expectations it has itself set in motion. He knocked on the door of the bathroom. “Find your own,” Max said. “This one’s mine.”